Ever since its first (and exemplary) publication by Georges Cirot almost a century ago the anonymous (so-called) ‘Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile’ has suffered from a degree of benign neglect from which only recently has it begun to recover. By means both textual and contextual the present paper seeks to promote rather than to determine discussion of a work in which the author’s relationship with Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, historiographical as well as official in connexion with the Castilian chancery; looms large. Also considered are the novel characteristics of the ‘Latin Chronicle’; the controverted process of its authorship; and its author’s apparently ambivalent dealings with Fernando III of Castile and León and his mother, Doña Berenguela.

1It was the man who made known the only surviving manuscript of the anonymous Latin Chronicle [CLI]1 who first commented on the textual parallels of that work with Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo’s De rebus Hispanie [DRH], albeit, as parallels go, these may be said not to amount to much. The two chroniclers’ accounts of the two great battles of their lifetime, for example, those of Alarcos and Las Navas de Tolosa, could hardly have been more different2. It is not so much in verbal similarities as in the sequence in which events are described that a resemblance between the two works is observable3. But one coincidence, remarked on by neither Cirot nor Julio González but by our absent colleague Francisco Hernández, clinches the matter and establishes the nature of their relationship. This is not something that they have in common in that from both it is missing. It is the absence of any account of the years 1220-23 as well as the manner in which each resumes his narrative after the lacuna: sufficient proof that here at least the archbishop was following our man4.

5 Though I am reluctant to accept the descriptions of CLI as written «lo suficientemente tarde para (...)

7 Whether the disappearance of manuscripts of the Romance Jofré de Loaisa was engineered in order to (...)

2So D. Rodrigo made use of the Latin Chronicle, just as elsewhere in his work he made use of the chronicle of Lucas of Tuy. Now we medievalists are broad-minded. We have to be: we regularly forgive plagiarism (provided it was done long ago, not recently)5. But the deliberate suppression of items of information, or of an entire source of information, that is another thing. Is it thinkable that D. Rodrigo was responsible for the fact that, but for the chance survival of the unique copy published by Cirot, and its modern descendent, the Latin Chronicle would be unknown to us? That is to say, was the almost complete disappearance of the work accidental? Or was it deliberate? To put it another way, ought we even to be thinking in terms of an act of depuración, of elimination of the competitor who had eclipsed him? And in that case was that disappearance due either to D. Rodrigo himself, in his capacity as executor of the author’s will in 12466, or of a loyal Toledan claque later active and intent on promoting the former archbishop’s account of modern times?7

3As we all remember, that account of modern times had been written at the behest of Fernando III. We remember this because the prologue to the De rebus Hispanie tells us as much ; just as the prologue to Lucas of Tuy tells us that the Chronicon mundi was written on the instructions of doña Berenguela. By comparison, the Latin chronicle appears to have had no influential friends or protectors – though we are also told that it was the influence of the same doña Berenguela that secured Juan de Soria his promotion as chancellor in 12178. Lacking even a prologue, the chronicle begins its account «in medias res». It enters shyly and anonymously into the confident and unforgiving world of thirteenth-century Spanish historiography.

4That anonymity is in many ways the chronicle’s most interesting feature. At any rate, it provides us with a starting point. Consider the possibilities. There are two. One is that once it had a prologue which identified its author, but that this somehow got detached from the body of the work. Here we must consider the relevance of the chronicle of the unnamed bishop of Burgos mentioned by Zurita9. Julio González considered it «probable» that this was our bishop and our chronicle10 – which, if correct, would date the work to 1240-1246. But, of course, it is not correct. Either González did not read, or he failed to understand, Cirot’s demonstration that the information about Aragonese affairs related by Zurita from the «general history of Castile» of that bishop of Burgos was supplied not by our chronicler but by one of his episcopal successors11.

5The other possibility is that it did not have a prologue And if it did not, then why not? Was it because it was never intended as a chronicle at all? Or rather, because in the mind of the compiler it had not yet reached that stage of development? Remember: though prologues are the first things the reader reads, they are the last thing the writer writes.

12 F. J. HERNÁNDEZ, «La corte de Fernando III…», p. 111, n. 28.

13 Herewith just one of the reasons for rejecting González’s suggestion that rather than borrowing on (...)

6As has often been noted, the Latin chronicle is unusually outward-looking, with information about foreign affairs provided at points throughout the text – but not always, indeed not often, at relevant points. These are notices which cannot be said to belong where they have come to rest, where it looks as if they have simply been left in expectation of a decision regarding their final destination. So could it be that what we have is a form of draft annals, as Dr Hernández has suggested12 an accretion of chancery annals prepared by a succession of, as it were, «annalists on duty»?13 In fact, ought we to be speaking of «a» compiler at all? Despite evidence of stylistic consistency (the use throughout the work of the adverb «intrinsecus», for example)14, ought we not rather to be speaking of «compilers» in the plural, amongst whom there was uncertainty whether entries were to be dated by the Spanish or the Christian era?15 (To these hypothetical «compilers» I shall return) And of chronicles in the sense of the «chronicles» mentioned by Guillermo Pérez de la Calzada, his «Rithmi de Iulia Romula seu Ispalensi Urbe», into which new material might be «added» or «written»?16

7Consider the end of chap. 62 and chap. 63 in its entirety, concerning the year 1231-1232:

9Reference to a chancery context brings us to an aspect of the matter which I have discussed elsewhere so will not repeat here, namely the probable extent of D. Rodrigo’s resentment at the loss of prestige implied by the transfer of the Castilian chancery to Juan de Soria in 1231. Previous writers, sustained perhaps by the unspoken conviction that the bishops of a canonised king could never have been in discord with one another, have gone so far as to suggest that the transfer was made on the archbishop’s own recommendation18 (It has even been suggested that the pair were cousins)19. In fact, the case was probably the opposite. The loss of the royal chancery represented a huge shrinkage of Toledo’s prestige at the very moment at which its archbishop was planning its apotheosis in both script and stone20. The case did not go by default. Confirmation of Juan de Soria’s episcopal promotion to the see of Osma was delayed by a year and a half or more, and by whom if not by his Toledo metropolitan?21 And almost a century later the issue of Toledo’s claim on the chancery was still alive. Out of concern for the state of the original of the chancellor’s 1231 undertaking to surrender the chancellorship to the archbishop if he died or if he were promoted to a see outside the province of Toledo, in August 1329 the treasurer of the Toledo would seek to secure an authenticated copy of the instrument22.

10On this occasion I wish to make just two observations and one suggestion. The first observation is this. In January 1218 (that is within three months of D. Juan’s first appearance as royal chancellor) D. Rodrigo was seeking compensation for his loss of the royal chancery and thereby of the opportunity to influence expressions of the royal will, by securing two privileges from the papal chancery, one confirming the church of Toledo’s primacy over the metropolis and province of Seville, the other granting it possession of the church of ‘Zucketa’ (hispanice ‘Zuqueca’), which the archbishop had persuaded the pontiff was identical with the Visigothic see of Oreto23 ; then, in 1231, in the very month of the transfer of Toledo’s hereditary chancellorship to D. Juan, D. Rodrigo had these privileges confirmed by Gregory IX24. It is difficult to believe that these coincidences were wholly fortuitous.

25 D. MANSILLA, La documentación pontificia…, n° 10.

26 It was seen as a suitably «juicy» return for the benefits of the cardinal’s influence at Rome, «qu (...)

11The second refers to the chancery of the kingdom of León which its traditional incumbent, the archbishop of Compostela, was also made to surrender to the abbot of Valladolid in 1231. Interest here attaches to the fact that in November 1216 Honorius III had sought to persuade Alfonso IX to bestow that office upon Juan Gaitán, papal subdeacon, magister scolarum of León, and nephew of Cardinal Pelayo Gaitán25. Notice two things: first, that none of those concerned pretended for a moment that the cancelleria of the kingdom of León was a purely decorative office. Far from it, the cancelleria of the kingdom of León (and of the kingdom of Castile too for that matter) was a licence to print money26. Secondly, that the pontiff’s request bordered on the limits of permissible interference in affairs of state, and that in November 1216, when it was made, Alfonso IX was in a peculiarly vulnerable position since another eighteen months were to pass before the pope was to declare his bastard son, the king of Castile, fit to rule the kingdom of León27.

12The suggestion is simply this: that the almost complete disappearance of what we call the Latin chronicle may have provided the archbishop with further compensation for the loss of that office.

28CLI, chap. 73-74. D. Rodrigo was at pains to insist that the chancellor who had done the honours «R (...)

29 L. SERRANO, «El canciller…», p. 39-40.

13The chancellor had replaced the archbishop as the intimate of princes. The spectacle of him celebrating the first mass in the purified mosque of reconquered Córdoba in 1236 may well have seemed to endanger that primatial jurisdiction regarding whose defence D. Rodrigo had been so exercised just five years earlier, and all the more so after 1243 by which time Fernando III was poised to deliver the Castilian Church into the hands of two of his sons and the chancellor was the bishop of an exempt see beyond the other’s jurisdiction28. The chancellor’s will recalls the man who had accompanied the infantes to Paris and Murcia29.

30CLI, cap. 58-59, where the author reveals (59: 6-7) that the cardinal had previously been bishop-el (...)

14His is the voice of the courtier, the insider who can record such intimate details as Queen Leonor climbing into bed with her dead son and trying to resuscitate him (20: 10-13) or letters from the king of Aragón concerning the capture of Mallorca (55: 24). But it is also the voice of government, with his remarks on the profitlessness of Gascony (c. 17: 41-3) representing, as it were, the considered opinion of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With his unusual emphasis on extra-peninsular events and their complexities, he was the first Castilian chronicler of international range. In his cosmopolitanism he provides the perfect foil for those doughty champions of Christendom, Alfonso VIII, Fernando III and…Cardinal Pelayo Gaitán, leader of the ill-fated Fifth Crusade30. D. Juan had his cultural formation in the Burgos of Bishop Mauricio while Alfonso VIII was scouring France and Italy for staff for his new university of Palencia, and maintaining Gerard of Cremona in his translation work at Toledo: a tradition which, by his support there of Hermannus Alemannus, D. Juan himself would continue in the 1240s31. His attitude with regard to Islam and the Islamic foe is more nuanced than Juan Gil has suggested32.

34 Acquaintance with at least the jargon of civil law is evident at chap. 2: 11-12 and 65: 4.

15He had been in Rome at least twice (30: 63, 67). Was it on his travels abroad that he had learnt the practice of royal annals, with the material for each year collected separately – and therefore that much more liable to be lost (as in Castile indeed it was) – and written up over a period of years?, with assistants in the chancery involved in the process, but not ‘for publication’ as they stood. The unpacked reference to Gratian in c. 1, recently identified by Prof. James Brundage in a footnote to O’Callaghan’s translation, provides an indication of this33. As do the playful reference «discordiam discordantium ad concordiam reuocauit» in c. 35: 9 apropos of Fernando III’s acclamation as king of Castile, and the description of the king of Aragón, Ramiro the Monk, in c. 4: 56 as «tamquam inutilis regni regimini». Here were the coded allusions for the cognoscenti amounting almost to a series of internal memoranda34.

16Coming after him, D. Rodrigo either sacrificed such foreign material to his by 1243 increasingly eccentric arrangement of both peninsular and other matters (for example, and in defiance of all chronological considerations, displacing Peter of Aragón to Book VI, chap. 4, and the affairs of the Latin Empire to Book VII, chap. 24) or felt no need to incorporate it at all, as in the case of the Albigensian Crusade, the Fourth Lateran Council (though, like D. Juan, he had been there), and Italian developments. Did D. Rodrigo find it easier to distribute non-Castilian material in this way, or to ignore it altogether, because it had not been assigned a place in the abandoned Latin chronicle’s narrative?

17The ‘annalist on duty’ hypothesis might be thought to account for the fact that more than half of all the classical allusions that the text contains occur in just five of its 75 chapters (concerning the years 1195-1211)35. The same explanation, namely that the «annalist on duty» had simply failed in that duty, might account for the complete absence of any record for the years 1220-1223. But it also raises other problems, in the words of scripture making «the last state worse than the first». For example, in the years before 1217 Juan de Soria was not yet chancellor, so when did he begin writing or superintending the writing of the Chronicle? Did he inherit a going concern? Or, from 1217, did he project back to the beginning of the reign of Alfonso VIII, «borrowing» the first eight thin chapters from somewhere, evidently not Lucas? Why, when the chancellor continued in office until his death in 1246, does the Chronicle end in 1236? Why was it that D. Rodrigo appears not to have made use of the CLI after 1224? For that matter, how did D. Rodrigo gain access to the chancellor’s account at all? Above all, how is the work’s concluding pentameter to be explained? «Hoc opus expleui tempore, credo, breui» (75: 5). What is the work that is being completed in short order here? Dr Charlo Brea has observed changes in the texture of the Chronicle from chap. 60 onwards. But whether he is right or wrong about that, the problems concerning CLI go far further.

18Allow me to approach these problems from two directions, first the contextual and then the textual.

19During the troubled period at the beginning of Fernando’s reign as king of Castile, after Berenguela had abdicated to him her rights of succession, it was alleged that in fact she had had nothing to abdicate because it was not she but her sister Blanca (Blanche of Castile) who was Alfonso VIII’s eldest surviving daughter. So Fernando’s domestic enemies stated in letters probably of 1224 in which they offered the Castilian crown to Blanche’s son, the future Louis IX. This, they claimed, was what on his deathbed Alfonso VIII had decreed should happen in the event of his son Enrique dying without issue. It was, one of them stated, the king’s «last will». That claim – which was to enjoy a measure of credence in interested circles, and particularly interested French circles, for centuries to come down to Bodin and beyond – depended entirely on the credibility of the story that Berenguela was junior to Blanche36. But that story had already been discredited, and it was the Latin Chronicle that had discredited it.

20There in chap. 33 we read that Alfonso VIII’s wishes regarding the succession toBerenguela as his eldest surviving daughter had been proved («declarabatur») by a certain charter sealed with his lead seal at the curia celebrated at Carrión, «que reperta fuit in armario Burgensis ecclesie». Now from its place in the narrative we seem to be meant to understand that this discovery was made in 1217 (the year in which Juan de Soria began to function as chancellor) and there is evidence in the same chapter that the account was written up before 1230 (33: 18-20). It was from here that D. Rodrigo got his version of the story37. But by the time D. Rodrigo’s «opusculum» left his hands in March 1243, that Burgos item was probably in the royal chancery, transferred there by Juan de Soria who had known Burgos since his youth38 and been bishop of the place since 1240. And no doubt that is why it is no longer in the Burgos archive along with the associated documentation concerning Berenguela’s aborted marriage to Conrad of Hohenstaufen (which would have served the purpose equally well)39.

21Another example of the chancellor’s international confidence was his relationship with the cardinal bishop of Sabina, John of Abbeville. It was with the chancellor rather than with the archbishop that in 1228-1229 the papal legate was in contact and at Valladolid where the chancellor was abbot that he held his council for the churches of Castile and León(chap. 54). Moreover, as is shown by an inscription on a papal letter of April 1231 (againat the very time of the transfer to D. Juan of the archbishop’s chancellorship) he certainly kept in touch with Castilian affairs thereafter40. The chancellor’s insistence on canonical marriage and his altogether sounder record on the subject of illicit liaisons, frequently remarked upon, may have had something to do with that41.

22This consideration leads me from the contextual to the textual. The use, no fewer than four times in a single chapter, chapter 65, of the word «contubernium» to describe these liaisons was one of the reasons adduced by Charlo Brea in support of his conjectural second author of chapters 60 to 75 of the Latin chronicle42. «Contubernium»can serve as something of a bench-mark here since, for all its author’s repugnance to such relationships, never before – not even in describing the clerical «sedition» that the legatine measures caused – had he made use of that pejorative description43. Nor had the word been employed in the relevant decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council44. Nor when Lucas of Tuy had used it had he done so in other than a neutral or even a favourable sense45.

46 P. LINEHAN, «A papal legation…», p. 240.

47DRH, VII.1: 10; VII.5: 47; IX.2: 29.

48Ibid., VII.31: 7-8.

49 P. LINEHAN, History and the historians…, p. 255-258.

23So what was it that had changed between the composition of chapter 14 of the Latin chronicle and chapter 65 to justify the usage of the word contubernium in contrast to (lawful) connubium? What had changed was that in 1229 that was the word used by John of Abbeville to describe such relationships46. After that (or rather, after chapter 65 of the Latin chronicle) even D. Rodrigo got the message – but only as regards foreigners: Aragonese husbands and Portuguese wives47. In the case of Alfonso IX of León and doña Berenguela of Castile, although he concedes that the pair were «consanguinitatis linea […] iuncti»48, nowhere does the archbishop describe their union in terms so demeaning – understandably perhaps since, after all, these delinquents were the parents of his king. Nor does he find space anywhere to mention that this particular contubernium was eventually dismantled49.

50DRH, IX.10.37. For the spiritual effects of ungirding, akin to those of godparenthood, see Peter LI (...)

24The relationship between the offspring of that liaison and doña Berenguela, already close, was further strengthened at Burgos in 1219 by the latter’s role in ungirding her newly knighted son, with all that that implied50. One generation on, the Latin chronicle recorded Fernando III returning to his mother and his wife from his exploits: to his mother and his wife, in that order51 and on one occasion just to his mother52. With a possessive mother reluctant to surrender her hold on her son, these must have been difficult times for the chancellor, whose emphasis seems to confirm, in diplomatic terms, what Lucas of Tuy declared openly: namely that, even as an adult, Fernando remained subject to his mother’s ferula, «as though he were a little boy»53. A similar remark about Berenguela – the «queen of Toledo», as the papal chancery curiously addressed her54 – was made by the Mantuan poet Sordello da Goito. In his plaint in memory of Blacatz d’Alms, Sordello imagines Europe’s rulers feasting off the heart of the deceased patron of troubadours in order to acquire the qualities they lacked themselves. In this scenario the king of Castile requires two helpings because he is the ruler of two kingdoms. «But if he does dine twice», the poet observes, «he will have to do so secretly because if his mother finds out she will beat him with her stick»55.

25Which brings us back to court and to differences of opinion there regarding the role of doña Berenguela, the queen mother and to these differences as they are reflected in the chronicles of the two prelates, the archbishop and the chancellor. Here is one, arguably the key event of Fernando III’s reign: the resumption of the reconquest in 1224. Whose idea was that? According to D. Rodrigo it was the queen-mother’s; it was to doña Berenguela that credit was due; this is recorded in a bare four lines of text56. The chancellor though, while recording the king’s acknowledgement of his debt to his mother («to whom after God I owe everything I possess») devotes a complete chapter to his address to the nobility. In the chancellor’s account then it is not the queen-mother, it is the youthful king (I mean, the Holy Spirit speaking through him) «ex insperato, humiliter et devote tanquam filius obediencie» (43: 6-7) who is made responsible for the Great Leap Forward –though, even now, onlyafter the queen-mother has seized the opportunity of providing her son with a toe-curlingly embarrassing object lesson in constitutional punctiliousness57.

63 Since his meal would encourage him to recover Castile, lost by his own stupidity, though only if h (...)

26If these indications are significant, the conclusion must be that, although at the start of Fernando’s reign, D. Juan was closely allied to the queen-mother to whom he owed his advancement, by the middle of it he, like her son, was striving to liberate himself from her continuing interference in affairs of state. Though until 1224 the lady who for D. Rodrigo was invariably «nobilis» also merited the same encomium and others from the chancellor58, after the resumption of the reconquista only once do we hear her praised, and then in the same breath as her «prudent» daughter-in-law59. Other issues also existed, specific to Osma, which must have strained its bishop’s relationship with the queen-mother60. Be that as it may, when in 1236 the king received the call to hasten to Córdoba he made it clear that nothing she might say would stop him. In D. Rodrigo’s account, by contrast, it is she who, although not physically present, is the brains behind the whole operation of restoring to Hispania the ancient dignity shamefully squandered of old, with her son little more than her agent61. But when, in April 1237, Gregory IX wrote to Castile in order to encourage Fernando III to make peace with the king of Navarre, it was not to the queen-mother and the archbishop that he did so but to the queen-mother and the chancellor62. Sordello’s contemptuous squib, therefore, which is datable to that same year or to early 1237, was founded on reality, as was his matching swipe at the expense of that other mother’s boy, the king of France, Louis IX, who, the poet claimed, like the king of Castile also lacked for appetite63.

27But that brings us back to the old claim that Castile belonged to France, which is far too delicate a matter for an Englishman in Paris to enter into.

28So instead, and by way of conclusion, let me return to Juan de Soria himself. As Julio González noticed, only three individuals in the Latin chronicle are allowed the luxury of an epithet: the chronicler himself (qua chancellor), the papal legate, of whom I have spoken, and Martín López de Pisuerga (1192-1208), D. Rodrigo’s predecessor as archbishop of Toledo, upon whom the chronicler lavishes words of unparalleled warmth64.

29Before his election to Toledo, Martín López had been archdeacon of Palencia65. This brings him into the mainstream of intellectual, and in particular of canonical, activity which I have discussed elsewhere and which, in the early decades of the thirteenth century, as well as Palencia, involved Osma, Soria, Calahorra and Zamora. There would therefore have been no shortage of compilers, or annalists, in that burgeoning École normale supérieure, the seminary out of which the personnel of the Castilian chancery was to emerge, under the control of its first professional chancellor66.

30There are all sorts of other things I might have spoken about but haven’t – one of them the language question, the (to me futile) question why the chancellor’s charters were in the vernacular while the Latin chronicle was in Latin. I say futile because from the mechanical treatment of historical questions you get mechanical answers: in this case, the conclusion, both futile and mechanical, that it must have been the chancellor Diego Garcia, the author of Planeta, or possibly his son, who was the author of our chronicle, as well as of much else67.

31We may wonder what more there is to be said about these chroniclers – Lucas of Tuy, the Latin chronicler, and Rodrigo of Toledo – who in the last ten or twenty years have received more attention than in the previous seven hundred. Ought they not now to be left alone to acquire a sort of historiographical patina, a sort of bottle age? «Whereof we cannot speak», it was once said, not altogether unreasonably, «thereof must we be silent». But it wasn’t a historian who said it. If that were the historian’s code there would be no history. As one of the twentieth century’s most acute medievalists once observed, «history would be a duller subject than it is if historians limited themselves to questions which admit of answers on the evidence available»68. Still, questions do deserve answers and, by the same token, answers demand questions. Indeed, it is almost the only reason historians have for communicating at all.

Notes

1 Georges CIROT, «Chronique latine des rois de Castile (1236)», Bulletin hispanique, 14 ,1912, p. 30-46; 109-118; 244-274; 353-374 ; 15,1913, 18-37; 17-87; 268-283; 411-427. Although in many respects Cirot’s edition and commentary have never been bettered, for convenience I will cite the CCCM edition by L. CHARLO BREA (1997). I wish to thank members of the colloquium for helping me to change my mind about various of the issues discussed below, also Professors James Brundage, Richard Kinkade and Roger Wright for their comments on an earlier draft.

13 Herewith just one of the reasons for rejecting González’s suggestion that rather than borrowing one from another, CLI and DRH may both have used a common source («una anotación común»): «La crónica latina…», p. 64-65. For in that case, where more appropriately might that source have been preserved than … in the royal chancery?

28CLI, chap. 73-74. D. Rodrigo was at pains to insist that the chancellor who had done the honours «Roderici Toletani primatis uices [gerente]» (DRH, IX.17: 8): apparently the only occasion in his chronicle on which he described himself as primate. See F. J. HERNÁNDEZ & P. LINEHAN, The mozarabic cardinal. The life and times of Gonzalo Pérez Gudiel, Florence, 2004, p. 30-32.

60 Namely Alfonso VIII’s bequest to the church of Osma of the lordship of the city (in 1204), which after 1214 both Berenguela and Fernando III strenuously and effectively opposed, resisting or ignoring all papal sanctions: P. LINEHAN, «D. Juan de Soria…», p. 387.

63 Since his meal would encourage him to recover Castile, lost by his own stupidity, though only if his mother allowed him to eat (since he did nothing without her permission): M. BONI, Sordello, p. 160; R. MENÉNDEZ PIDAL, Poesía juglaresca y orígenes de las literaturas románicas, 6th ed., Madrid, 1957, p. 141-142. For Sordello’s exile in Spain and France, see M. BONI, p. 47-48.